The Liberators Podcast

We're back!

How diverse is your team? Do you have members from different age groups, different genders, different roles, and different cultural backgrounds? Is that diversity beneficial to team performance, or is it challenging, or both?

This was the research question of an academic study we performed with Prof. Daniel Russo. This study has been peer-reviewed and published in the journal "Transactions on Software Engineering". This episode provides a non-technical overview of our investigation, core findings, and practical implications. 

Read the post:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-the-double-edged-sword-of-diversity-in-teams-765ff72a55da

Read the peer-reviewed scientific publication:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2023.3339881

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

The first thing people tend to see when they look at the Scrum framework are the roles, the artifacts, and the events. But that is only structure. There is much more going on in Scrum teams that we can understand better from other perspectives.

One such perspective is motivation. Scrum is deeply rooted in insights from academic research into what motivates people and teams to become high-performing. And while those roots are strong, they are also mostly invisible and unknown to practitioners.

In this podcast, we take a scientific perspective on how Scrum can create motivating environments for teams and individuals. We also translate these insights into practical tips that you can use to make the work for your team more motivating.

Read the full post behind this episode, including all the links, here
https://bit.ly/3HKZRuE

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

“We consistently observe that teams struggle with continuous improvement. Instead of keeping it small, simple, and practical, teams go for ambitious — but vague and unclear — improvements.”

The improvement actions that come out of Sprint Retrospectives and other reflective practices are weak when there is no sense of scope, no sense of timeline, and no sense of who is involved. Interestingly, this creates a clear connection with something else that good Agile teams spend a lot of time on: refinement.

In this episode, we explore how to refine your improvement actions to make them more actionable and thus easier to accomplish. We also offer a lot of practical tips for how to create better improvement actions.

Read the transcript here:
https://bit.ly/3KqtfGA

Or get our "Unleash Scrum In Your Organization"-kit which contains - among many other cool things - a deck with 100 Improvement Actions categorized into different areas. These are a good source of inspiration for your own improvements. Or you can use them verbatim:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/frontpage/products/scrum-teams-superpower-kit-also-for-virtual-teams

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

What makes a good Product Owner? How much time should they spend with their team or with stakeholders? Or writing items for the Product Backlog? Do Product Owners require a full mandate in order to be effective? What strategies make them more - or less - effective?

In this episode, we explore scientific research that investigated Product Owners. We also share some of our own research.

Read the transcript here:
https://bit.ly/2XXBaZ7

Or download do-it-yourself workshops to encourage shared product ownership:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/do-it-yourself-workshops-meetups-and-strings/build-what-stakeholders-need

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

"SAFe destroys autonomy", "estimation is a waste of time" and "Scrum Masters can't also be Product Owners" are just a few of the strong claims that are often made in our professional community.

But where is the evidence to support these bold claims? We sampled 50 posts with similar bold claims and found that only 3 offered *any* kind of evidence. Two of those were purely personal experiences. We also explored some actual research into these questions and found more nuanced results.

We wonder: why doesn't our community - that is all about empiricism - apply empiricism to itself and its claims? Why don't we gather actual objective evidence? Why do we allow each other to make bold claims that either lack evidence or aren't proportional to that evidence? Are we not harming our profession with this low bar?

In this episode, we discuss a professional crisis in our field. We also offer five things we can do to improve our profession. Ultimately, if we rely more on objective evidence we make a much stronger case for what we believe to be true. Or we may discover that our beliefs aren't actually true - which is a good thing too.

Read the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/why-doesnt-the-agile-community-practice-empiricism-12082e48ffba

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

"It slowly started to dawn on me that something else was happening during these gatherings. Something I hadn’t seen before so clearly in my previous work with groups. I saw so many happy faces around me. I saw so many people intently listening to each other as each shared a personal story. And I saw so many people touched by the awareness that others were really listening to them as they shared those stories."

This  episode is about the psychological power of Liberating Structures. They are like a language for how people interact. Once you learn to speak and recognize its symbols and its grammar, you see its potential everywhere people interact. I know how weird that sounds — especially when you’ve never experienced them before. This potential affirms my belief that we should use Liberating Structures everywhere people interact.

Unfortunately, even experienced practitioners tended to limit their use to the more obvious settings, like workshops, classes, and training, but not to other settings, like recurring meetings, social settings, and other informal settings. And that includes us too. And that's a waste, as we explore in this post.

Read the transcript for this episode here (along with pictures)
https://bit.ly/2Z8uk3M

Join an upcoming Immersion Workshop via:
https://liberatingstructures.nl

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

A common belief among Agile practitioners is that Scrum works best in smaller organizations. Things are simpler there, and you don't have all those impediments of your typical corporate. Since much of our day-to-day experience is also with smaller to medium-sized businesses, we are also included to believe this.

But is it consistent with the facts? We believe that you should always ground your beliefs in evidence as much as possible. So we explored scientific studies and performed our analyses on data from ~2.000 teams to find out. The results may surprise you, and we take time to try to understand why it's so different than we expected.

Read the post:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-does-scrum-only-work-in-small-organizations-2f2d7cd9079d

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

Are Scrum Masters perhaps too focused on the process, and too little on whether or not that process actually delivers valuable outcomes? How is that for you, as a Scrum Master?

This is a hunch based on countless conversations we've had with Scrum Masters, including our own practice as a Scrum Master. But what do the facts say? So we read relevant scientific studies and collected data through a large poll (500+ participants) and data from almost 2.000 Scrum teams. We were also fortunate to use data from a research study by McKinsey and Scrum.org.

The data suggest that Scrum Masters are more effective when they balance a process-based perspective with a value-based perspective. This means that Scrum Masters lead in designing effective Sprint Reviews, drawing in stakeholders, and emphasizing the need for this. I expect that Scrum Masters that stake a strong stance here are more likely to see effective Scrum teams over time. I offer tips on how to do this.

Read the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/are-scrum-masters-sufficiently-focused-on-valuable-outcomes-7b51c4403869 

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

We are creating the Scrum Team Survey to help Scrum teams and Agile teams to diagnose their process. We also give tons of evidence-based feedback. One of the cool things about developing a product ourselves, and with our own money, is that we get to learn (or reaffirm) a lot of valuable lessons about Agile software development.

In this episode, we share our 10 biggest lessons. Be prepared for some technical stuff though, as several of these lessons involve architecture, design, and code quality.

Read the blog post for this episode here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/how-work-on-the-scrum-team-survey-taught-us-10-lessons-about-agile-95314ee2fdc1

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.

Do your Daily Scrums feel like a pointless ritual where everyone just lists what they’ve done yesterday, and what they do will do today? Does Sprint Planning feel like a waste of time because everyone only wants to know what they have to do? And does your Sprint Review consist of team members listing their individual accomplishments? If so, you are probably dealing with a complete lack of coherence and cohesion.

This episode is an exploration of scientific insights that help us understand what coherence and cohesion are, and why they are so important. We also explore how these insights create a strong foundation for the Scrum framework. We also translate scientific insights into practical applications, ready for use with your team.

Read the transcript here:
https://medium.com/the-liberators/in-depth-how-coherence-and-cohesion-are-critical-to-scrum-f5ae1f3a1aef

Find many do-it-yourself workshops to help your team:
https://shop.theliberators.com/collections/do-it-yourself-workshops-meetups-and-strings/Scrum

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.